Polonius would have been very much at home categorising
historical novels. It is easy to dismiss them as costume dramas,
but that would be forgetting some very important writers that you
would never want to miss out on.

It's like a huge and unwieldy city, the historical novel, one
that requires something like a streetmap to negotiate its varied
neighbourhoods. Its sprawl contains (to mention only a tiny few)
Tolstoy, Malory, Dickens, George Eliot, and more recently, James
Joyce, Patrick White, Thomas Keneally and Hilary Mantel. Why do
such writers want to tell stories about the past? Why do we want to
read them?

Maybe we need another term. What do you instantly think of when
you hear or read the phrase historical novel? For many, it's just
about romance - and as Seinfeld would say in quite another context:
Not that there's anything wrong with that. But living it up in the
slums of the city of the historical novel there is the
embarrassing, naff-historical romance, the bodice-ripping,
swashbuckling sort. These are written mainly for publishers such as
Harlequin or the recently defunct Silhouette. The reason such books
are bad is that they are neither historical nor really romantic.
They have many fans, but a steady diet of such empty things can't
be good for you: like living on potato chips and nothing else.

In a well-kept, genteel part of the city we find the Austen-lite
Georgette Heyer, always good for a reread because many of her books
are funny and informative. Then there are the earnest dull books,
the semi-detached fictionalised biographies of queens and
princesses: the Jean Plaidys, Anya Setons and Mary Stewarts that
your grandma reads in large print from the local library.

For masochists who like trouble at t' mill there is Catherine
Cookson. Going lower in the pecking order you'll find Barbara
Cartland and her myriad genre imitators, full of palpitating
bosoms, trembling maidens, swishing petticoats and forsooth
milordery.

But wait, there's more. We haven't plumbed the depths yet; there
is also the American-Indian frontier romance, that demented genre
within a genre, for readers who want to immerse themselves in an
adventure involving an Irish immigrant lass and a bloke called
something like Soaring Eagle.

I have to put my hand up here and admit at this point that such
things can be really good for a laugh. Years ago I found a copy of
an effusion titled First Love, Wild Love at an op shop and
just had to fork out the 50 cents for the blurb alone: "From the
moment she caught sight of him,, working on the road gang, Brianna
knew the Indian was forbidden to her. He was a prisoner, a heathen,
a savage male animal who would have no mercy on her tender youth
and innocence. Yet one look in his dark, fathomless eyes told
Brianna he'd captured her soul ..."

Et cetera. It was a read-aloud-to-shrieks-of-laughter book. My
sisters berated me for buying it and then grabbed it from me to
read other bits aloud - we chuckled till our faces ached. But the
political incorrectness seems worse now than it did a decade ago;
when I wrote those stupid words down just then, I wondered how
Native Americans might feel about such an intrusion into their
culture's sexuality. These days there is no leeway for unconscious
racism and that is a good thing. People reading these things
uncritically may be in all sorts of ethical trouble.

There is the better sort of romantic-historical, such as Sara
Dane and the Angelique series.

My fondness for these goes way back to pre-teens. My mother felt
I was safe with Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind,
but forbade me Catherine Gaskin's I Know My Love and Anne
Golon's Angelique until I was much older. In these books,
there is a wealth of period detail and the sense of exploring
another time. Such books draw you in with their story, with their
ways of telling it. Historical novels aren't all bunk; they're as
good as the writer writing them.

Gaskin and Mitchell are dated now; their stories are all about
finding one's true love and all the detail and colour in the book
are subordinate to the imperative of getting the hero and heroine
together. In this they are only one cut above the pulp genre stuff
unlike Golon, author of the Angelique series, who has
privileged access to the library at Versailles, where for the past
40 years she has researched the era of Louis XIV.

Hilary Mantel, that dark, brilliant English writer, also
researched a few generations later about the France of
revolutionary times and produced A Place of Greater
Safety, one of the best pieces of writing to emerge from
Britain in the last years of the 20th century. The final paragraph
is something that stays in the mind and disturbs with its
compression of beauty, pain, hope, the inevitability of death and
loss. Mantel is such a sharp writer; nothing escapes that steady,
surgical eye, and the images that arise could be just as easily
about her own writing.

Its concerns are essentially human and timeless: "Now, whenever
he looks at a piece of lace - even though his eyes are bad - he
seems to see every thread of the work. At the Committee table, the
image rises at the back of his mind, and forces him to look far,
far back into his childhood. He sees the girl on the window-seat,
her body swollen, pregnant with death: he sees the light on her
bent head; beneath her fingers the airy pattern going nowhere,
flying away."

Thomas Keneally, author of The Chant of Jimmy
Blacksmith and Schindler's Ark (two highly
significant historical novels), says that all good novels that are
set in the past are just as applicable to the present as the time
of which they treat.

He is tolerant about novels that are mainly about the past's
exoticism and oddness. They can be addictive, he says, and adds
that some deeply researched novels whose main interest is this
exoticism can be very good books. We can read for curiosity, for
information, for diversion, and that is absolutely fine. He cites
Robert Graves' I, Claudius and Margaret Yourcenar's
Memoirs of Hadrian as examples.

He understands why historians are sometimes contemptuous of
historical novels. Poor research and pedestrian imagination can
enrage the knowledgeable. They can be badly crafted, too: their
prose afflicted with what he calls a "literary creakiness". It
makes him think of errors of judgement in the movies: he mentions
Eric Bana's ludicrous lisp in the movie Troy, and we laugh
and remember the famous Tony Curtis line: "Yander lies de kestle of
my fodder."

We can all recall historicals with fake language,
two-dimensional emotions and a lack of understanding of how people
lived in the times they treat of. Or in any time for that
matter.

"Human experience is a continuum," Keneally says. "People bring
their past with them; their past is part of their present." The
journey they make is through the political situation they have left
or that they continue with.

This has profound implications for him, for he says that he
would not now write The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith in the
way he did more than 30 years ago. Set at the dawn of the 20th
century, it plunges us straight into the fictitious thinking
process of Blacksmith's uncle, which is the problem for Kenneally
now.

When the book was published in 1972, Australia had just passed
through a major enabling period, he says, allowing Aboriginal
people the vote and counting them as full citizens of Australia in
the census. "When I wrote the Chant, there weren't many Aboriginal
writers, not as there are now. The Aboriginal point of view that I
dared to adopt in the book really properly belongs to Aboriginal
people."

If he were writing it today, he would write as a white observer,
someone taken hostage, who tries to interpret from a European
perspective. "I got away with it in the sense that my Aboriginal
friends forgave me - they more or less thought my blundering heart
was in the right place." He would be more sensitive to their right
to tell their own stories now. "I don't say that as someone who
thinks there should be rules; but so much has been plundered," he
says.

He says that Chant was a parable on many levels: it was set at
the time of the Boer War, which caused controversy. It was being
written during the time of the Vietnam War, which (to put it
mildly) caused controversy too. It was about our history and also
our 1970s present.

On rereading, it is still vivid, clear, charged with feeling and
a sense of urgency. If it was wrong to appropriate the mindset and
persona of the Aboriginal person, it was still done in a way that
told suburban white Australia things it needed to know in a way
that they could receive them at that time.

Kate Grenville's The Secret River has addressed this
problem. It, too, depicts a slow build-up of circumstance and
character until finally mass murder is committed. Blacksmith
reversed? Perhaps. Her prose is exact, often beautiful, but more
muted than Keneally's.

It is done from the settlers' point of view; as with Keneally,
we see reasons, not excuses. If the feeling at the end of
Grenville's book is less poignant and bleak than that of Keneally's
it is to do with the fact that with her protagonist, William
Thornhill, only innocence is lost. He will go on and populate the
new land that so recently belonged to the Aborigine, for his story
is not over. For Jimmy Blacksmith, there is nothing left, no
future, no connection with Aboriginal culture, his identity now
forever a construct of colonial paternalism.

Thornhill's victory may be hollow, however. He cannot experience
triumph in it, because unlike his accomplice Smasher he is not a
psychopath. For five years, Grenville researched every possible
aspect of the book, wanting it to be based at every point on
historical veracity. The inspiration for the book began when she
visited the house of her emancipist great-great-great grandfather.
She wondered why there was such a high wall, and no windows at the
back and sides. The people who lived there originally must have
felt very threatened by the tribes they were dispossessing.

The resulting book is powerful: London in the early 19th century
was a hideous place, as inimical to life as any of the snakes and
spiders so feared by the new settlers. The Old Country is a sink of
poverty, squalor and the ever-present threat of death, either by
starvation or through execution for stealing a trifle for survival.
The privations of the voyage of transportation are not over-dwelt
on; dirt, death and suffering are things that William Thornhill's
family are used to. The bush is seen through frightened English
eyes, as are the Aboriginal people. Such a book takes on the
present as well as the past. Writing in The Age, Jane
Sullivan saw the history wars flaring up again over the novel's
firm acceptance of the Henry Reynolds position on massacres of
Aboriginal people in Australia's history.

There are, too, other novels where the past is more than
exploration and story, it is an arena for play, satire and
political manifesto. In 2000, four Italian writer/activists,
Roberto Bui, Giovanni Cattabriga, Federico Guglielmi and Luca di
Meo published the novel Q under the nom-de-plume of Luther
Blissett, a retired soccer star.

They describe their work as choral; each part fits with the
others and produces a coherent though sometimes strident whole.
Such endeavours may recall Umberto Eco and his forays into the
nature of writing a novel. Q takes it to a playful level but deals
with serious stuff: the beginning of the Reformation just after
Luther has nailed the 95 theses to the door of the cathedral in
Wittenberg. Even in translation, it is sprightly, gruesome, savvy
and interesting.

The authors have since reinvented themselves as Wu Ming (Chinese
for Anonymous) and written 54, an interwoven set of stories set in
1954 at the height of the Cold War. They play with history, using
real characters, just as a writer dealing with 1066 will use
William of Normandy and Harold the hapless Saxon.

In 54 they use Cary Grant; he is dragooned to charm Tito into
remaining independent of Stalin. All Wu Ming's books can be
downloaded free from their website: they say they believe in
copyleft as well as copyright. (www.wumingfoundation.com/english/englishmenu.htm).

Non-romantic historicals can be deeply concerned with politics,
war and belief and even science. Neal Stephenson's extraordinary
Baroque Trilogy takes on science and economics, and pulls it off.
Stephenson became fascinated with the Age of Enlightenment because
it was so like now.

The trilogy is ambitious. Quicksilver, the first book,
reverberates with the power struggles of Louis XIV, William of
Orange and George II, through to The Confusion. The final
of the series has the audacious title The System of the
World. It's not just a cute well-researched work of historical
fiction. It puts into perspective the way the modern banking system
evolved. It portrays people such Isaac Newton, Gottfried Liebniz
and Robert Hooke as early sort of hackers. At 3000 pages in all,
the trilogy is a hefty read, but if your taste is to be informed
and make intelligent connections, you will have a cracking good few
weeks reading it.

Stephenson is a writer trying to make sense of our time. Whether
it's through a fiber-optic cable or a brass-framed eyeglass, he
uncovers some of the permanent truths of human nature: he proves
how important the perspective of story is to our civilisation. This
is how we figure ourselves out.

In the end, as Keneally says, any good book deals with our past
and our present. Whether we're looking for curios, allowing
ourselves to be instructed, delighted, or edified - or whether
we're looking to be brought sharply to face the depths of human
experience, there will be a historical novel somewhere doing some
or all of these things.

Kate Grenville discusses her work with Arnold Zable on August 27
at the Malthouse. Carrie Tiffany talks about writing her first
novel on August 21 at the Malthouse.

SIX GOING TO THE PAST FOR THE PRESENTThe Secret River, By Kate Grenville
Grenville makes patent how an essentially decent man can become a
murderer. The condition of the poor in London of 1806 bears
disquieting comparisons with the current state of some of our
Indigenous people 200 years later. Yet it is not just a political
novel; it is human nature that Grenville explores, in a framework
that builds reason upon reason till unreason emerges.

Cryptonomicon, By Neil Stephenson
The Village Voice claims that this is the first great
historical novel of cyberculture. Stephenson is prodigiously
intelligent; reading this complex, funny interwoven narrative of
World War II code-crackers and 21st-century hacktivism, you might
feel your IQ rising. Stephenson is aware of past and present and
how the one informs, or disinforms, the other.

The Lambing Flat, By Nerida Newton
An account of racial tension at the gold diggings, and a forbidden
relationship between a struggling grazier's daughter and the son of
a Chinese immigrant, in the atmosphere of the Lambing Flat
atrocities. Yet the focus, again, is not so much agitprop as
humane; Newton has a handle on the poignancy of love that becomes
perilous.

Women on the Rocks: A Tale of Two Convicts, By
Kristin WilliamsonIf the narrative at times seems arbitrary, it's because
Williamson has chosen to flesh out the records of two women who
were transported to Sydney in 1820. There is a wealth of historical
detail. One for the archaeologists.

A Place of Greater Safety, By Hilary
Mantel
This is a great novel by any measure you want to apply. Mantel
makes revolutionary France come alive again in a way that makes us
both appreciate the historical research while drawn irresistibly by
her wonderful writing and her compassionate yet relentless insight
into human nature.

Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living, By
Carrie Tiffany
Tiffany's heroine is a sewing expert on a team of government
advisers who travel by train from one country town to another
during the depths of the Great Depression in Victoria. She meets a
soil expert, wild about superphosphate, and they connect. The
simple authority of such people in that time, the belief that
science was a simple thing that would lead to progress, is gently
but ironically drawn.